The tremor under the city spoke in a language only foundations understand—push here, hold there, breathe—but the sky had other plans. By the time the team reached the colossus stair, noon had fitted itself with jewelry. Halos, dozens, slid down the light like rings on a polished arm and settled above intersections, each one a bright wheel of etiquette with teeth.
"They learned from yesterday," Selene said, tasting metal on the air. Her shadow tightened around her boots, not as threat, as traction.
Luna opened her brass case on a stoop and fed two magnets to the hinge of a drainpipe. The halo nearest them wrote a sentence across the cobbles, clean hand, no smudges: You must present yourselves for assessment.
Luna pinched the hinge on her brass leaf. "Must is an amplifier," she murmured. "Watch."
The word blurred, softened, and—very politely—became can. The halo's edges dulled. Its self‑confidence faltered the way a host's does when a guest declines to be impressed.
"Good manners," Cyrus said, amused, rolling his shoulders under the Oath cord. "Bad day."
Beyond the square a second halo tilted and wrote should over a queue of mothers at a soup line. Luna looked up, measuring. "Should is a guilt valve. Detune at the pivot." She touched metal to curb, and the should turned into could if—followed by four blank spaces that refused to fill themselves without witnesses.
People didn't cheer. They simply used the space offered. Bowls moved. Bread returned to being bread instead of sacrament. The queue exhaled as if lungs remembered they were allowed.
"Go," Aragorn told Selene. "Get night above the mines before noon remembers how to pry." He could feel Earth under the stones asking for sentence, not sermon.
Selene's mouth quirked. "I'll set a seam you can pull when the roof thinks about becoming a ceiling." She moved, the shade following as if shy and willing, and the first halo she passed forgot its line, the way an actor does when a better play starts next door.
They were three streets from the stair when sunlight thickened at the mouth of an alley and a man in armor stepped out of radiance as if he'd been in the conversation the entire time. Not the Commander. A captain—wings etched with script, spear engraved with verbs that liked to tell people what to be.
"By order of the Stair," he said, voice kind enough to soothe a fever, "deliver the bell and the one who rings it."
Cyrus planted himself between alley and street, weight centered, ankles honest. "Ask nicer."
The captain considered, then nodded once, acknowledging the attempt. He lowered the spear to the cobbles and drew a circle around his boots, neat and priestly. The halo above him focused; scripts on his feathers simmered.
"Martyr protocol," Luna breathed, recognition cold as a coin on the tongue. "He'll detonate, sacralize the blast, and call it clean."
The captain closed his eyes. Script crawled up his throat like ivy. The circle brightened—a self‑forged altar with a man for the fire. Civilians flattened against shutters. Even the halo drifted back a hair, as if unwilling to be spattered with sincere consequences.
Aragorn stepped forward, the bell hot under his hand without ringing. Fire hummed along his forearm, white and exact: read intent first. He tasted the circle's grammar and found the hook: suffering as proof, pain as passport, death as argument.
"Consent must delight," he said softly, and let the bell's hum loosen the verb that made sacrifice contagious. He laid his brand against the sentence at the circle's edge and wrote a narrow line of heat through its spine: harm returns to the hand that writes it.
The circle trembled, confused to discover a mirror where it expected an applause sign.
Luna set a magnet at the captain's heel. "Demand voids willingness," she added, crisp as a margin note. "Your proof lacks joy."
The captain's lips moved around a prayer that had always worked. It didn't sing; it coughed. The circle flickered. The halo above re‑wrote a clause in smaller letters: Are you sure?
Cyrus didn't wait for policy. He stepped into the circle and set his palm, not to the spear, not to the man, to the cobbles. The Oath cord thrummed low, a drum behind ribs. "Pain's paid," he told the light. "Divide it. No interest."
The shock that should have lifted roofs and named a square after sorrow rippled sideways, thin as wind. Knees buckled and then un‑buckled. A child hiccupped and found the hiccup funny. The captain's breath left him with a surprised sound, like a man discovering a door where a wall had always been.
"Why?" he asked, small and human.
"Because you're not proof," Aragorn said, lowering the bell. "You're a person."
The halo above them dimmed a shade and edged away, embarrassed to be caught looking at faces when it had promised to study principles.
Something scratched along the high bricks to their left, not claws—quills. The Artemis‑hound nosed the air at Aragorn's shoulder and found nothing discontinuous enough to swallow. It sat, ears pricked, eyes the color of polished bone. It would have preferred to chase stolen seconds. It could respect a day that learned to hide them in work.
"Captain," Luna said, keeping her tone bureaucratic so dignity would feel invited, "you can walk out of the circle. Or you can collapse a block and have to fill out a disaster report witnessed by grandmothers. Choose."
He opened his eyes. Read them. Read the street. Stepped carefully over his own line, as if it were a crack on a child's dare. The scripts on his wings cooled, embarrassed; he glanced up as if expecting reprimand.
It came.
Sunlight stiffened on the next rooftop. The Sunfall Commander materialized with the reluctance of a supervisor called down to retail. He planted his spear into light and pulled a scale from noon itself, heavier than the radiant balances the juries carried.
"Radiant Scales," Luna whispered. "Field triage. Courtroom on a wire."
The Commander didn't draw blood. He drew a docket. The scale surveyed the street and selected targets according to rules that treated inconvenience as probable cause.
Selene reappeared at Aragorn's flank as if she'd never left, rain in her hair, a strip of predawn stitched under her boots like a secret corridor. "Earth has a sentence ready," she said. "It'll wait for punctuation."
The Commander lowered his scale over the stoop where the witness cups still sweated. On one pan, accusation stacked itself in perfectly centered phrases. On the other, all that waited was a kettle, three cups, and the names of people who had cooked and carried.
"Hold them," Aragorn told Selene without turning. "Luna—detune the musts, trim the shoulds."
"And you?" Selene asked.
Aragorn set the bell on the curb and wrote into the stone where feet had taught it language: verdicts require shade, witnesses, and chores. He lifted his branded wrist to the scale's fulcrum and pressed the white stitch there to the exact word that made guilt heavy and work light.
"Anchor?" Cyrus asked, rolling his shoulders, already distributing the next sting before it was born.
"Not this time," Aragorn said, and smiled almost gently at the halo‑logic that wanted to be law. "We'll pay with boredom."
The scale hesitated, tilted, listening for a song it understood and finding only a kettle coming back to boil.
The Commander looked down the length of his spear at a city that had remembered how to be inconvenient on purpose. His jaw set, courteous in its disapproval. "Then we expand venue," he said, voice carrying like heat over water. "Bring testimony to the air."
Above the square, more scales flickered on—hundreds—arranging themselves like a court migrating to better weather.
Selene's net rose to meet them, night stretched thin as patience and twice as strong. Luna's magnets clicked into a grid so tidy even the Auditor would have smiled. Cyrus laughed under his breath and set his feet where the next beam would land, because sometimes a wall is a promise, not a posture.
Aragorn glanced once toward the north, where the colossus mines waited with their sentence half‑formed.
"Hold them," he said softly, bell warm on his palm. "Then we go below and learn how to breathe."
— End of Episode 13 —